Practice, research and training in biomedicine generate considerable amounts of electronic data and computational models, which are known in the art as biomedical resources. A significant proportion of such resources carry information that cross-references biological structures, such as anatomical, cellular and molecular structures. Examples of biomedical resources include a surgical report detailing a surgical procedure involving the stomach, a microscopy image of a liver cell, and a biochemical model of a glucose metabolic pathway.
The knowledge domains of anatomy, physiology and functional anatomy are branches of the domain of biology knowledge. The knowledge domain of anatomy is concerned with the study of the material and structural features of biological structures and their parts, ranging from whole organisms to the molecular constituents of their component cells. The knowledge domain of physiology deals with physical interactions between biological structures. The knowledge domain of functional anatomy provides an account of how the structural layout of biological structures is organized to fulfill physiological interactions.
It is desirable that functional anatomy knowledge about biological structures informs the schematic depictions of said structures so that the resulting visual composites of reference illustrations and related biomedical resource information may serve as visual aids to education, research and clinical practice by the biomedical community.
The management of biomedical resources, such as the actions of indexing, classification, comparison and searching of data and models carried out by computers operating through appropriate programming, is the subject of extensive efforts by members of the biomedical community. In particular, effective management of resources from different scales requires effective visualisation tools that display information about these resources in a meaningful way. An effective approach to achieving visualisation is to display resource information in the context of biological structures related to these resources.
The consistent visual depiction of biological structures for functional anatomy requires the complex arrangement of anatomical parts to be laid out within the constraints of scale imposed by the medium in which they are drawn. Automating the consistent visual depiction of biological structures across multiple scales is technically difficult to achieve, such that biologists and biomedical professionals have had to rely on manual methods to create complex visual representations. For instance, the generation of small-scale cellular depictions of complex structures, such as cells in bones or kidneys, is constrained by the limitation imposed by the size of the media used for those depictions. This means that descriptions of larger scale features of large structures, such as whole bones and whole kidneys, and the functional relationships between large structures and their parts, such as cells or molecules within these cells, must be omitted or may only be achieved through cumbersome manual systems of annotation and linking between separate illustrations. A well-designed method to consistently generate visually meaningful schematics of anatomically- or physiologically-related biological structures is therefore required to automatically organize and describe biomedical resources relevant to biological structures and their functional anatomy.